The New RF Shielding Requirements: Why Shared Understanding Will Decide Who Gets This Right
- Phillip Chance
- 7 hours ago
- 3 min read
A PSC commentary on a field letter from Charlie Peart, Secure Facility Integrators, LLC.
A colleague of ours, Charlie Peart of Secure Facility Integrators, recently circulated a letter to the secure facility construction community. Charlie has been doing this work since the Cold War, and he wrote to raise a flag about a shift he is seeing in the RF shielding requirements attached to the ICD705 projects now moving through the pipeline. We think his warning is worth reading, and worth building on, so with his blessing we are sharing our take here.
The short version of Charlie's message is that the requirements are changing faster than the shared understanding around them, and that gap is where projects get into trouble.
What is actually changing
The headline number looks manageable. Charlie notes the RF shielding requirement is landing at 60 dB, which is a level the industry knows how to meet. The complication is what comes with it. Customers are also asking for 10 kHz magnetic shielding and microwave performance out to 18 GHz, driven by a desire to protect facilities against EMP and directed energy. As Charlie puts it plainly, aluminum foil will not meet that requirement.
That single sentence carries a lot of weight. A foil room that performs well against ordinary RF can fall apart against a magnetic and high frequency requirement, and the way it fails is not always obvious until testing.
The failure mode is coordination, not capability
This is the part we want to underline, because it matches what we see across secure facility projects generally. Charlie describes two problems teams keep running into. Customers often give inaccurate direction when what they are really after is EMP protection, and he has already seen this from agencies. And customer TEMPEST engineers are mixing Red/Black engineering with RF shielding construction, which are related but separate disciplines that do not substitute for one another.
The physical consequences are specific. Foil wrapped around black sprinkler lines, plastic conduit and slip components on remotely located RF filter connections, and copper HVAC piping run through so-called waveguide penetrations all become antennas that re-radiate test frequencies back into the shielded area. Once a signal is inside, in Charlie's words, it bounces around like a BB in a boxcar, and you end up chasing one leak only to uncover the next.
None of that happens because the trade partners are not good at their jobs. It happens because the RF requirement, the TEMPEST intent, and the construction detailing were never brought into the same conversation early enough. Secure facility projects don't usually struggle because teams aren't capable. They struggle when understanding isn't shared. This is a clean example of it.
Why it matters to your proposal and your schedule
Charlie is direct about the cost, and we would not soften it. Meeting these requirements takes proven shielding designs, the right materials, and a level of installation quality that is genuinely costly and time consuming. His estimate is that the requirements can raise project cost on the order of 60 percent depending on facility size, and that reality has to show up in the cost proposal rather than as a surprise during testing.
There is an upside in that same fact. A strong proposal and design submittal is itself a demonstration of technical understanding. It surfaces the real requirement, and it gives the customer a clear decision to make: fund the requirement properly, refine it, or issue a waiver where performance cannot be met. Teams that show that command of the problem tend to be the ones the government keeps on its short list. Teams that cut corners tend not to last, which is a pattern Charlie watched play out the first time around.
The question worth asking
Charlie closes with a point we think deserves a wider audience: does the whole building need to be shielded, or does the critical equipment need to be protected? Server rooms can carry high performance shielding, workstation interfaces can be handled with fiber optic connections, and an end of day backup moves the data somewhere protected. That is a threat analysis question, and it is the kind of question that is far cheaper to ask during planning than to answer during construction.==
Where PSC fits
Our role in projects like these is validation and advisory work, and helping teams build the shared understanding that keeps RF, TEMPEST, and construction detailing aligned from concept through accreditation. If your team is looking at a SCIF/SAPF and wants a second set of eyes on the shielding approach before it goes into a proposal, that is exactly the kind of conversation we are glad to have. talk to an expert today
Our thanks to Charlie Peart for raising the flag. Charlie can be reached at Secure Facility Integrators, LLC.
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